Black Bean Soup for 1, 2 or 4
I’m in the mood for Black Bean Soup for lunch. It’s 11:37 and I’m hungry; how on earth am I going to pull this off? Easy! I’m going to pull the half-can of leftover tomato sauce in my fridge, the half-used box of chicken stock, a can of black beans and a few other ingredients and make myself some Black Bean Soup.
If you don’t have much time, you have a few staple ingredients on hand and you like a healthy, flavorful soup, have I got a meal for you!
Unassuming Artisian Bread
I made Beef (well, elk)-Barley soup yesterday. It wasn’t blog-worthy. You could do a search for “Beef-Barley soup” and come up with dozens of better recipes. I mean, Beef-Barley soup is pretty basic and hard to mess up, but it’s also hard to come up with a truly outstanding recipe. I’ll probably try to follow this recipe the next time I get the Beef-Barley hankering. I’ll let you know if I come up with something extraordinary.
In the meantime, I made this bread to go with the soup, and it WAS blog-worthy.
Spaghetti Squash Soup
I had half of a spaghetti squash that I needed to use up, and I didn’t feel like going the traditional marinara route. So I googled “spaghetti squash soup” and came up with a handful of recipe options. This is the one that I decided to try.
Gluten-Free Cornbread with Cheese and Green Chiles
The hubby and I have been eating a lot lately; big meals, heavy meals. He asked that whenever possible this week, we eat light. So I’m obliging him tonight with a spaghetti squash soup [recipe forthcoming]. It’s simple and light and that will hopefully help us feel a little less thick around the waist when we enter the next weekend that will, once again, entail lots of fatty (and delicious) food.
Salsa Chicken and Black Bean Soup
I alluded to this recipe the other day, but here it is in full: Salsa Chicken and Black Bean Soup.
I’d recommend making this soup “by the book” (if it can be “by the book,” given that it comes from the Internets) the first time, and then you can play around with it after that. This last time that I made it, I only had a 3-cup portion of chicken stock in the freezer, so I added a teaspoon of beef “Better Than Bouillon,” just to see what the beef flavor would do (didn’t notice much difference). I also had a big bottle of Pace salsa sometime earlier this spring that I was afraid would go bad, so I froze 2 cups worth and just dumped the frozen brick into the crockpot along with the frozen chicken stock. I was “quick soaking” the beans, so I added them after the other liquids heated up.
Also, this time around I didn’t have any sour cream on hand, but I did have some leftover cilantro cream sauce, so that’s what I added at the end of the day, after everything else had cooked on high for around 6 hours. Finally, I didn’t have any raw chicken, so I pulled pieces off of last night’s rotisserie chicken and sprinkled them on top of our soup.
To put it plainly, you can’t go wrong with these flavors. Sprinkle some shredded cheese on top and you’re golden: cheese covereth a multitude of cooking blunders.
No-Knead, Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread
As promised yesterday, here is my new favorite bread recipe. It was developed by King Arthur Flour, and it’s great because it takes about 5 minutes of hands-on time (more if you’re juggling a cranky 10 month-old while mixing ingredients, etc). This bread makes great toast, it makes a good sandwich and, of course, it’s great right out of the oven with a bowl of soup.
Since it’s a proprietary recipe, they recommend that you use their brand of flour to make it. I’ve been using Wheat Montana, and my favorite is their Prairie Gold (whole wheat) flour. My only other advice is to make sure it’s a pretty wet dough – if your flour is older, you might want to add some more water, or the bread will be really dense. It should be wetter than chocolate chip cookie dough, though not quite pourable.
It makes one loaf of bread, but you can double it if you want to give a loaf away 
Or, it makes a couple of nice, small loaves, and the other day I baked a batch in my 7″ Dutch Oven so I could hollow it out into a bread bowl for crab dip.
Be sure to have some butter ready when you pull this out of the oven!
Pioneer Woman’s Corn & Cheese Chowder
I’ve already shared with you Pioneer Woman’s Corn Chowder with Chilies, which is, as to be expected, delicious. PW excels in comfort food; and as with most comfort food, the more fat, the better. Her Corn & Cheese Chowder is no different. Not even remotely health food, but delicious and perfect for a crisp autumn day lunch with a friend.
I served it with my new go-to bread recipe, which I’ll share tomorrow. Because every soup chef needs to have a couple of easy bread recipes in her (or his) back pocket, right?
African Sweet Potato Soup with Peanut Butter and Black Beans
This is a unique soup. The flavor combinations are very unexpected, but it’s the kind of surprise that, after I pondered it for a bit, I decided was a very good one. Especially if you happen to like peanut satay, which we both do, very much.
Poor Titus couldn’t weigh in on the whole combo because he’s not allowed to have peanuts yet.
This recipe comes straight from the Gluten-Free Goddess, except I used all black beans because I don’t like Black-Eyed Peas. I’ve tried ‘em, and I don’t like ‘em. If you happen to try this, let me know what you think!
Curried Coconut Butternut Squash Soup
It’s soup season again! Which, hopefully, means that I will be back at the soup blog more regularly. I have, in fact, made a number of soups recently, and I have a super easy one simmering in the crock pot now.
This one, however, I made about a month and a half ago, and it’s a little bit of a stretch for me to remember what I did for it. I do remember that it was delicious (even my 9 month old gobbled it down!) and that I wanted to make a record of it. I used this recipe as my base, but I wanted to add more depth of flavor as my Cook’s Illustrated for that month had indicated (no link, but I’ll describe it), and I also wanted to add coconut milk … because anything with curry tastes better with coconut.
Cream of Tomato Soup — fast and easy!
Today is one of those transition-to-spring days. Warm enough to tantalize you, but cold enough that you wouldn’t want to stay outside for long. I thought it seemed like a soup-for-lunch day. JR thought it seemed like a sandwich (with melted cheese) day. What’s the perfect meet-in-the-middle lunch? Tomato soup with grilled cheese, of course!
